Sick sea birds are showing up on central Florida beaches

Posted: Apr 13, 2018 11:17 AMUpdated: Apr 13, 2018 4:21 PM GDT

 (WESH) Scores of rare sea birds are washing up on central Florida beaches, starving and near death.

Northern Gannets are rarely seen in Brevard County, but they migrate far off the coast, heading to their breeding grounds on the coastal cliffs of Maine and Canada.

In a tragedy that's not been seen there in more than 15 years, many are not making it.

"They are usually very exhausted, very thin, and it's just touch and go whether they're going to make it or not," said Tracy Frampton at the Florida Wildlife Hospital.

Since late March, Frampton says the hospital has received a total of 85 birds.

In a few cases, the Northern Gannets have regained their strength, and can be released to resume their migration.

Biologists aren't sure why so many haven't been able to find or catch the fish they need to survive.

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Ocean fronts attract ocean wanderers

Foraging gannets on the front line

Date: September 21, 2016

Source: University of Exeter

A team of scientists led by Plymouth University and the University of Exeter examined the feeding behaviours of breeding northern gannets (Morus bassanus) in the Celtic Sea.

They showed that in the majority of cases, the birds performed shallow and short dives with less swimming when at ocean fronts, signifying the possible presence of abundant food closer to the water's surface.

Writing in Royal Society Open Science, researchers say the findings have important implications for conservation because these habitats could be earmarked for designation as marine conservation zones.

Ocean fronts occur where bodies of water meet and are typically marked by strong gradients in temperature and salinity, alongside converging surface current flows.

Previous studies have shown they are important for marine ecosystem functioning, with accelerated photosynthesis creating more plankton and thus attracting more fish, which may be concentrated at the water's surface.

Gannets feed by flying high and then circling before plunging into the sea to catch fish. The RSPB estimates there are 220,000 gannet nests in the UK, and because they only breed at a few selected sites, they are on the organisation's Amber List for conservation.

For this study, which ran over two years, scientists tracked 53 breeding birds using bird-borne GPS devices and time depth recorders, examining the relationship between 1,901 foraging dives and satellite-detected ocean fronts in the Celtic Sea.

The results showed that in the majority of cases around fronts (~94% of dives), birds deployed a short V-shaped dive, indicating food was easier to catch close to the surface. In some instances, where food is less easily available, gannets may use a U-shaped dive, spending more time underwater so as to reach food at deeper depths, but this rarely occurred in frontal dives (~6% of the time).

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Alderney may get first accredited bird observatory in Islands

19 November 2015

The colony of northern gannets on Les Etacs, a rock off the west coast of Alderney, has grown since two birds first nested in 1940

The first nationally accredited bird observatory in the Channel Islands will be located in Alderney, if a pilot scheme is successful.

The Alderney Wildlife Trust, with the help of the British Trust for Ornithology, will launch the pilot observatory next year.

The Wildlife Trust hopes to meet the required level of excellence for accreditation by 2018.

Manager Roland Gauvain said: "It is an exciting project."

There are already 19 observatories in the UK and Ireland, which enable researchers to monitor bird populations and migration patterns.

However, Mr Gauvain said that there was a "relatively small" number of observatories on islands, which includes the islands of Farne and the Calf of Man.

He said Alderney was in the unusual location of being close to the French continent where it could see a large number of birds in a small area.

Continued …

Gannet colony on Bass Rock is world’s largest

The colony of Northern Gannets at Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth has been confirmed as the world’s largest colony with around 75,000 occupied sites, an increase of 24 percent since the last count in 2009.

Stuart Murray, who carried out the count in conjunction with the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology said: "The colony was photographed from the air on 23 June 2014. Conditions were excellent, with no wind and a high cover of thick cloud which obscured the sun, reducing the glare from all these startlingly white birds. The images were later viewed on computer screens for counting and each occupied site was blocked-out as it was counted.

"Interestingly, the most dramatic increase is between the old lighthouse keepers’ garden and the summit of the Rock. We counted around 10,000 sites in this area compared with 6,500 five years ago." 

Sarah Wanless, from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, said: “It is particularly heartening to see them doing so well when so many other seabirds in Scotland appear to be in trouble, however, the Bass Rock is a small island and the gannets have now filled most of the available nesting habitat. The colony now has only very limited capacity for further increase.”

Continued ...

Chicks starving in Newfoundland as warmer sea water imperils food supply for birds

Northern gannets are good parents. The seabirds mate for life, lay just one egg a year and dutifully feed and protect their chick until it leaves the nest in September.

But this year, thousands of gannets on Newfoundland’s south coast — on North America’s most southern gannet colony — abandoned their nests during the last few weeks of August. Many of the hungry chicks soon began tumbling off rocky cliffs and into the sea.

“It’s shocking,” says Bill Montevecchi, a biologist at Memorial University who describes it as one of the strangest events he has witnessed in his more than 30 years studying the seabirds. But, then, so too was the sea water near the colony that was several degrees Celsius above normal in August and appears to have triggered the abandonment.

It could be a harbinger of things, say scientists at the Audubon Society who have made the bold prediction that climate change could “imperil” nearly half of North America’s birds by the end of the century.

“It’s not so much that the adults are just going to die, but that they’ll not be able to successfully raise enough young to replace themselves over succeeding generations,” says biologist Gary Langham, lead author of Audubon’s grim forecast.

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Gannets Could Be Affected by Offshore Energy Developments

ScienceDaily (Nov. 8, 2012) — Scientists at the University of Liverpool have discovered that proposed offshore renewable energy developments in the English Channel have the potential to affect the foraging behaviour of northern gannets from Alderney in the Channel Islands.

The study by the University of Liverpool, the British Trust for Ornithology and Alderney Wildlife Trust, funded by the Alderney Commission for Renewable Energy, used GPS technology to track 15 northern gannets breeding on Les Etacs in North West Alderney to find out about their feeding habits and whether the routes they travelled could be affected by proposed English and French offshore energy developments.

Not dependent on specific feeding sites

The study found that on the whole gannets flew in the same direction and for the same distance but they vary significantly in the amount of time they spend searching for food which suggests that individual gannets do not depend on specific feeding sites.

Louise Soanes, from the School of Environmental Sciences, said: "We found that the area where the gannets travelled for food overlapped with nine sites earmarked for offshore marine energy developments which suggests that the feeding habits of these birds could be affected, as well as the potential for collision with wind turbine developments.

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121109091200.htm